Monday, October 12, 2015

Notes on Pialat's Short Films

1951-1966

From Pialat's handwritten scenario for Janine.

The following originally appeared in the booklet for the 2009 Masters of Cinema UK DVD release of La gueule ouverte [1974] which I co-produced.

Dan Sallitt's 2008 essay on Police (which he considers one of his favorite pieces of his own writing) has just been posted at his blog, here. A dossier of my translations of interviews with Pialat about the film has been posted here.

Dan's 2010 MoC essay on À nos amours. has also been posted at his blog here. A visual I made for the film along with my translation of the 1984 Le Monde conversation between Maurice Pialat and Jean-Luc Godard can be found here.

My essay on Passe ton bac d'abord... — "The War of Art" — can be read here. A dossier of my translations of four interviews with Pialat around the film can be read here.

Pialat Discusses His Short Works: Excerpts from a Conversation with Serge Toubiana (2002)

Translated from the French by Craig Keller

PIALAT ON JANINE

Janine, the short I made with Claude Berri, was shot with direct sound, except for maybe a few seconds that I had to dub. In addition to that, the film was butchered, but that’s another story... It wasn’t worth getting worked up over — for example, we were shooting in a café, well, we were shooting from the other side of the glass, the camera was outside, or the other way around. And then, you have to recognize that I was doing the dubbing, but on the spot, at the time of the shoot. We’d shoot a scene, there wouldn’t exactly be ‘kilometers’-worth’ of tape, and we’d re-perform the sound right away, sometimes in an approximate manner, not always synchronous. I’ve never shot other than with sound.

PIALAT ON MAÎTRE GALIP

In order to make those shorts about Istanbul, we stole a bit of film-stock from Robbe-Grillet. Not an enormous amount, but in the end there was enough of it to easily make a half-dozen short films. I would have even been able to make a feature, which would have been much more exciting. It’s too bad... These documentaries made in Istanbul were silent, given a soundtrack after the fact, along with a commentary. [...] Alright, the crew consisted of four individuals... But I had a topic: it was a poem by Nazim Hikmet, that I used somewhere else in a different short which, in my opinion, is the best one: Maître Galip. But I haven’t seen it in twenty years. [...] Maître Galip is the only one that corresponds to what I would have been able to make at the time within that genre, without the slightly pompous commentary that accompanies it, as I don’t think that this was necessary to make it better. It’s really reportage, but reportage that’s more architectural than documentary or sociological. I was kind of telling stories, recounting historical events like the seizure of Istanbul... •

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“Pialat spends three months filming Istanbul with his cameraman Willy Kurant. In an impulse we easily imagine to be obsessive, they make shots, take views in the Lumière sense of the term: it’s a true return to the primitive in the way of working the real: the faces, the stones, the alternation between movement in the streets and images at a stand-still, photographs, almost, in their lumineuse évidence.”
— Clélia Cohen, Cahiers du cinéma no. 566, March 2002

Little Lexicon of Anglophone Cliché: A Work in Progress c. 2007

"For [so-and-so, in dedication]" (exception: the Histoire(s) du cinéma, which invented the practice in cinemaville)

"I found myself unprepared for the emotional wallop"

"Love it or hate it, ... "

"Unfortunately, compared with Rohmer's earlier work, in particular the series known as 'Six Moral Tales,' The Romance of Astrea and Celadon has little to say about eros that's still relevant. It's a film so embarrassingly quaint it's crying out for a parody called Not Another Medieval Movie."